Isaac Asimov

Scientist

1920-01-02 – 1992-04-06

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and biochemistry professor known for science fiction and popular science books. He authored or edited hundreds of works, including the Foundation and Robot series.

Quotes by Isaac Asimov

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.
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Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.
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It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
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Flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters.
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The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.
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In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.
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There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
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Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.
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Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.
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If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.
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Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.
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The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.
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I shall not be alive a half decade hence,— said Seldon, —and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, —man.
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The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
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Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.
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The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile.
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Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself---what's the expression---ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.
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The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
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Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful
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Were I to use the wits the Spirits gave me, then I would say this lady cannot exist - for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.
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